bookit.com renews partnership with Travelport

1 December 2009

Travelport, one of the world’s leading providers of global distribution systems (GDS), today announced the renewal of an agreement with online travel company BookIt.com®. Through the four-year agreement, Travelport’s Worldspan platform will provide access to traditional air, rail and hotel content as well as the added ability to book low-cost air content. The Travelport deal also provides BookIt.com with three strategic solutions including industry leading e-Pricing™, to ensure travelers have the most advanced tools for shopping low fares; Travelport Rapid Reprice™, an automated ticket repricing product; and XML Pro™, a Web Services solution enabling fast and efficient interface with Worldspan and the exchange of structured data.

Rather than focusing on travel search by specific destination, BookIt.,com presents travelers with the option to use its exclusive, patent-pending FROM™ technology for advice on where to go based on the kind of vacation they want. By simply indicating the type of vacation they want, such as skiing, honeymoon, someplace warm, along with the approximate travel timeframe, BookIt.com quickly delivers the 20 best package deals from the travelers’ origin city or nearest airport(s). For those travelers who know where they want to go, destination searches are also available.

According to Jamin Finlaw, vice president of Product Development of BookIt.com, “Travelport has been there for BookIt.com from the beginning, to listen, consult, plan and deliver the products we require. The importance of this high level product and support cannot be overstated in our extremely competitive industry, so we are excited to renew our partnership and look forward to continuing to innovate together.”

BookIt.com has deployed Travelport e-Pricing, the travel industry’s first multi-server-based pricing technology powering an unrivalled suite of low-fare shopping solutions that accesses the world’s best and lowest fares. Powering the world’s major online travel retailers and leading travel providers, e-Pricing is capable of searching millions of fares and hundreds of thousands of itinerary options to find the lowest available fares and ensures airlines, consumers and travel agents get the information and choice they expect. The dynamic e-Pricing engine provides the fastest, most accurate fare searches, and yields more comprehensive itinerary results from a growing universe of Travelport participating airlines.

“This new agreement demonstrates the value that leading online travel companies such as BookIt.com place in Travelport’s cost-effective, reliable and broad-based e-Commerce solutions and shopping capabilities that access the broadest possible range of prices and schedules for clients around the world from one platform,” said Travis Christ, president, The Americas, Travelport GDS. “We are pleased to deliver the functionality and technology that BookIt.com needs to enable them to grow and succeed.”

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BookIt.com has also implemented Travelport Rapid RepriceTM, the industry-leading product that has been automating the complex, time-consuming ticket exchange processes since 1999. Travelport Rapid RepriceTM enables BookIt.com to increase efficiency by automatically recalculating the price of a ticket in a fraction of the time it takes to recalculate manually. The product automatically integrates fare and rule categories for voluntary changes, net fares, private fares and fare-by-rule from ATPCO filed fares.

A significant decrease in the instances of airline debit memos can be expected due to the product’s superior data integrity and repricing accuracy. Travelport Rapid RepriceTM facilitates repricing of tickets irrespective of the booking system that issued the ticket and has been delivering financial rewards to some of the world’s largest agency and airline customers. More than 100 million fully automated transactions have been processed since launch, demonstrating the product’s unique functionality and scalability.

BookIt.com is also utilizing XML Pro™, Travelport’s leading XML solution for fast and efficient interface with a GDS that provides an affordable solution for travel companies to exchange structured data, as well as reduces operating costs and system maintenance. XML Pro also eliminates the need for suppliers and retailers to use third-party solutions for GDS interface, and employs the latest OpenTravel Alliance universal data transmission specifications for travel.